Spotlight on noir

Hard-boiled crime stories punch up the world of graphic novels

July 29, 2009|By Geoff Boucher, TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS

LOS ANGELES — Even when the movies ended up bad -- and they usually did -- crime novelist Donald E. Westlake never had a problem taking Hollywood money for his ideas. But with his signature creation, the ruthless career criminal known simply as Parker, Westlake insisted that the names be changed to protect the guilty.

Westlake, who died at age 75 last New Year's Eve, saw seven movies made from his Parker novels (which were published under his pseudonym Richard Stark), but in each film the main character's name was changed; even when Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall or Mel Gibson was in the role, Westlake wouldn't entrust his favorite brand name to anyone else. That changed, though, in the final months of Westlake's life in an unexpected way that had nothing to do with Hollywood.

A Nova Scotia-based illustrator named Darwyn Cooke and a San Diego book editor named Scott Dunbier convinced the aging author that the ideal visual medium for his terse, bare-knuckled tales of mayhem was the graphic novel. And, after Westlake saw Cooke's spare and stylized artwork (between the vintage cool of "Mad Men" and the storytelling flair of Milton Caniff's "Steve Canyon" comic strips), he enthusiastically agreed. The result hit shelves this month: the graphic novel "The Hunter" (IDW Publishing, $24.99), a meticulously faithful adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name.

The Cooke adaptation is already being hailed as a masterpiece by key tastemakers in the comics world, and last week it met the public as Cooke and Dunbier took it to Comic-Con International in San Diego, the massive pop-culture expo that is a sort of Cannes for capes or a Sundance for sci-fi. Cooke was on two panels, including a program titled "A Darker Shade of Ink: Crime and Noir in Comics."

That might conjure up memories of the infamously lurid EC Comics of the 1950s, but hard-boiled crime is heating up in the word-balloon medium. Superheroes still dominate comics, but "The Hunter" is part of a surge in noir-minded projects that owe far more to the bloodied pulp of Westlake, James M. Cain and Jim Thompson than they do to the cosmic melodramas of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

Next month, DC Comics, publisher of the bright-hued Superman, is launching a new imprint called Vertigo Crime that will be populated by bloodthirsty lovers and mob enforcers. The first releases are the sexed-up murder tale "Filthy Rich" by Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos and "Dark Entries," a locked-room mystery written by the Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin.

Hollywood has been watching with interest. "A History of Violence" and "Road to Perdition," both well-regarded films, were adaptations of crime comics and in September comes "Whiteout," a blood-in-the-snow serial killer story based on the 1999 Oni Press series by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber.

Cooke's pen-and-ink Parker may well lead to a new round of Westlake curiosity in Hollywood. If Cooke puts Parker back on screen, it would be poetic justice; the artist became a Westlake fan after watching a late-night rerun of John Boorman's 1967 classic "Point Blank," regarded as Hollywood's best take on the cruel charisma of the novels. "The movie just blew my head apart," Cooke said, chuckling. "Lee Marvin was so brilliant in it and the story was very simple -- a crime story, a genre story -- but it was so compelling."

"The Hunter" (the first of four Parker adaptations planned by Cooke) tells the tale of a battered, betrayed professional criminal named Parker who seeks vengeance and dismantles anything (and anyone) in his way. Cooke said the lean Westlake prose is ideal for the graphic novel medium.

"The original novel was really an experiment to see if he could tell a story without any real emotional content," Cooke said. "The clean, direct prose style brilliantly leaves things for the reader to fill in for themselves. I needed art that matched that."

Cooke said crime, romance, westerns, war and horror are still woefully overlooked by DC and Marvel, the dominant publishers. "If people want to go see Quentin Tarantino movies, why wouldn't they want those comics? The scene is ripe for newcomers to come in with different ideas."

Cooke never met Westlake, and the author never saw the finished Parker adaptation. Last December, Cooke mailed Westlake a batch of finished pages but the parcel arrived at the novelist's home while he was away on vacation in Mexico. The writer suffered a fatal heart attack during the trip.

The news left Cooke in a deep funk. He walked away from the project for a time. "I had been doing it," he realized, "for an audience of one." Eventually, he returned to the drawing table for a reason the straightforward Parker would respect. "He wanted this done, and now it is."